I must now give you some fuller particulars of my history. I am the
daughter of a civil engineer, Steven Lally by name, who was so
unfortunate as to die suddenly at the outset of his career, and before
he had accumulated sufficient means to support his wife and her two
children. My mother contrived to keep the small household going on
resources which must have been incredibly small; we lived in a remote
country village, because most of the necessaries of life were cheaper
than in a town, but even so we were brought up with the severest
economy. My father was a clever and well-read man, and left behind him a
small but select collection of books, containing the best Greek, Latin,
and English classics, and these books were the only amusement we
possessed. My brother, I remember, learned Latin out of Descartes'
"Meditationes," and I, in place of the little tales which children are
usually told to read, had nothing more charming than a translation of
the "Gesta Romanorum." We grew up thus, quiet and studious children, and
in course of time my brother provided for himself in the manner I have
mentioned. I continued to live at home; my poor mother had become an
invalid, and demanded my continual care, and about two years ago she
died after many months of painful illness. My situation was a terrible
one; the shabby furniture barely sufficed to pay the debts I had been
forced to contract, and the books I despatched to my brother, knowing
how he would value them. I was absolutely alone. I was aware how poorly
my brother was paid; and though I came up to London in the hope of
finding employment, with the understanding that he would defray my
expenses, I swore it should only be for a month, and that if I could not
in that time find some work, I would starve rather than deprive him of
the few miserable pounds he had laid by for his day of trouble. I took a
little room in a distant suburb, the cheapest that I could find. I lived
on bread and tea, and I spent my time in vain answering of
advertisements, and vainer walks to addresses I had noted. Day followed
on day, and week on week, and still I was unsuccessful, till at last the
term I had appointed drew to a close, and I saw before me the grim
prospect of slowly dying of starvation. My landlady was good-natured in
her way; she knew the slenderness of my means, and I am sure that she
would not have turned me out of doors. It remained for me then to go
away, and to try and die in some quiet place. It was winter then, and a
thick white fog gathered in the early part of the afternoon, becoming
more dense as the day wore on; it was a Sunday, I remember, and the
people of the house were at chapel. At about three o'clock I crept out
and walked away as quickly as I could, for I was weak from abstinence.
The white mist wrapped all the streets in silence, and a hard frost had
gathered thick upon the bare branches of the trees, and frost crystals
glittered on the wooden fences, and on the cold cruel ground beneath my
feet. I walked on, turning to right and left in utter haphazard, without
caring to look up at the names of the streets, and all that I remember
of my walk on that Sunday afternoon seems but the broken fragments of an
evil dream. In a confused vision I stumbled on, through roads half town
and half country; gray fields melting into the cloudy world of mist on
one side of me, and on the other comfortable villas with a glow of
firelight flickering on the walls; but all unreal, red brick walls, and
lighted windows, vague trees, and glimmering country, gas-lamps
beginning to star the white shadows, the vanishing perspectives of the
railway line beneath high embankments, the green and red of the signal
lamps,--all these were but momentary pictures flashed on my tired brain
and senses numbed by hunger. Now and then I would hear a quick step
ringing on the iron road, and men would pass me well wrapped up, walking
fast for the sake of warmth, and no doubt eagerly foretasting the
pleasures of a glowing hearth, with curtains tightly drawn about the
frosted panes, and the welcomes of their friends; but as the early
evening darkened and night approached, foot-passengers got fewer and
fewer, and I passed through street after street alone. In the white
silence I stumbled on, as desolate as if I trod the streets of a buried
city; and as I grew more weak and exhausted, something of the horror of
death was folding thickly round my heart. Suddenly, as I turned a
corner, some one accosted me courteously beneath the lamp-post, and I
heard a voice asking if I could kindly point the way to Avon Road. At
the sudden shock of human accents I was prostrated and my strength gave
way, and I fell all huddled on the side-walk and wept and sobbed and
laughed in violent hysteria. I had gone out prepared to die, and as I
stepped across the threshold that had sheltered me, I consciously bade
adieu to all hopes and all remembrances; the door clanged behind me with
the noise of thunder, and I felt that an iron curtain had fallen on the
brief passages of my life, and that henceforth I was to walk a little
way in a world of gloom and shadow; I entered on the stage of the first
act of death. Then came my wandering in the mist, the whiteness wrapping
all things, the void streets, and muffled silence, till when that voice
spoke to me, it was as if I had died and life returned to me. In a few
minutes I was able to compose my feelings, and as I rose I saw that I
was confronted by a middle-aged gentleman of specious appearance, neatly
and correctly dressed. He looked at me with an expression of great pity,
but before I could stammer out my ignorance of the neighborhood, for
indeed I had not the slightest notion of where I had wandered, he spoke.
"My dear madam," he said, "you seem in some terrible distress. You
cannot think how you alarmed me. But may I inquire the nature of your
trouble? I assure you that you can safely confide in me."
"You are very kind," I replied; "but I fear there is nothing to be done.
My condition seems a hopeless one."
"Oh, nonsense, nonsense! You are too young to talk like that. Come, let
us walk down here, and you must tell me your difficulty. Perhaps I may
be able to help you."
There was something very soothing and persuasive in his manner, and as
we walked together, I gave him an outline of my story, and told of the
despair that had oppressed me almost to death.
"You were wrong to give in so completely," he said, when I was silent.
"A month is too short a time in which to feel one's way in London.
London, let me tell you, Miss Lally, does not lie open and undefended;
it is a fortified place, fossed and double-moated with curious
intricacies. As must always happen in large towns, the conditions of
life have become hugely artificial; no mere simple palisade is run up to
oppose the man or woman who would take the place by storm, but serried
lines of subtle contrivances, mines, and pitfalls which it needs a
strange skill to overcome. You, in your simplicity, fancied you had only
to shout for these walls to sink into nothingness, but the time is gone
for such startling victories as these. Take courage; you will learn the
secret of success before very long."
"Alas, sir," I replied, "I have no doubt your conclusions are correct,
but at the present moment I seem to be in a fair way to die of
starvation. You spoke of a secret; for heaven's sake, tell it me, if you
have any pity for my distress."
He laughed genially. "There lies the strangeness of it all. Those who
know the secret cannot tell it if they would; it is positively as
ineffable as the central doctrine of Freemasonry. But I may say this,
that you yourself have penetrated at least the outer husk of the
mystery," and he laughed again.
"Pray do not jest with me," I said. "What have I done, _que sais-je_? I
am so far ignorant that I have not the slightest idea of how my next
meal is to be provided."
"Excuse me. You ask what you have done? You have met me. Come, we will
fence no longer. I see you have self-education, the only education
which is not infinitely pernicious, and I am in want of a governess for
my two children. I have been a widower for some years; my name is Gregg.
I offer you the post I have named, and shall we say a salary of a
hundred a year?"
I could only stutter out my thanks, and slipping a card with his address
and a bank-note by way of earnest into my hand, Mr. Gregg bade me
good-bye, asking me to call in a day or two.
Such was my introduction to Professor Gregg, and can you wonder that the
remembrance of despair and the cold blast that had blown from the gates
of death upon me, made me regard him as a second father? Before the
close of the week I was installed in my new duties; the professor had
leased an old brick manor house in a western suburb of London, and here,
surrounded by pleasant lawns and orchards, and soothed with the murmur
of the ancient elms that rocked their boughs above the roof, the new
chapter of my life began. Knowing as you do the nature of the
professor's occupations, you will not be surprised to hear that the
house teemed with books; and cabinets full of strange and even hideous
objects filled every available nook in the vast low rooms. Gregg was a
man whose one thought was for knowledge, and I too before long caught
something of his enthusiasm, and strove to enter into his passion for
research. In a few months I was perhaps more his secretary than the
governess of the two children, and many a night I have sat at the desk
in the glow of the shaded lamp while he, pacing up and down in the rich
gloom of the firelight, dictated to me the substance of his "Text-book
of Ethnology." But amidst these more sober and accurate studies I always
detected a something hidden, a longing and desire for some object to
which he did not allude, and now and then he would break short in what
he was saying and lapse into revery, entranced, as it seemed to me, by
some distant prospect of adventurous discovery. The text-book was at
last finished, and we began to receive proofs from the printers, which
were intrusted to me for a first reading, and then underwent the final
revision of the professor. All the while his weariness of the actual
business he was engaged on increased, and it was with the joyous laugh
of a schoolboy when term is over that he one day handed me a copy of the
book. "There," he said, "I have kept my word; I promised to write it,
and it is done with. Now I shall be free to live for stranger things; I
confess it, Miss Lally, I covet the renown of Columbus. You will, I
hope, see me play the part of an explorer."
"Surely," I said, "there is little left to explore. You have been born a
few hundred years too late for that."
"I think you are wrong," he replied; "there are still, depend upon it,
quaint undiscovered countries and continents of strange extent. Ah, Miss
Lally, believe me, we stand amidst sacraments and mysteries full of awe,
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Life, believe me, is no
simple thing, no mass of gray matter and congeries of veins and muscles
to be laid naked by the surgeon's knife; man is the secret which I am
about to explore, and before I can discover him I must cross over
weltering seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years.
You know the myth of the lost Atlantis; what if it be true, and I am
destined to be called the discoverer of that wonderful land?"
I could see excitement boiling beneath his words, and in his face was
the heat of the hunter; before me stood a man who believed himself
summoned to tourney with the unknown. A pang of joy possessed me when I
reflected that I was to be in a way associated with him in the
adventure, and I too burned with the lust of the chase, not pausing to
consider that I knew not what we were to unshadow.
The next morning Professor Gregg took me into his inner study, where
ranged against the wall stood a nest of pigeon-holes, every drawer
neatly labelled, and the results of years of toil classified in a few
feet of space.
"Here," he said, "is my life; here are all the facts which I have
gathered together with so much pains, and yet it is all nothing. No,
nothing to what I am about to attempt. Look at this;" and he took me to
an old bureau, a piece fantastic and faded, which stood in a corner of
the room. He unlocked the front and opened one of the drawers.
"A few scraps of paper," he went on, pointing to the drawer, "and a lump
of black stone, rudely annotated with queer marks and scratches,--that
is all that drawer holds. Here you see is an old envelope with the dark
red stamp of twenty years ago, but I have pencilled a few lines at the
back; here is a sheet of manuscript, and here some cuttings from
obscure local journals. And if you ask me the subject matter of the
collection, it will not seem extraordinary. A servant girl at a
farmhouse, who disappeared from her place and has never been heard of, a
child supposed to have slipped down some old working on the mountains,
some queer scribbling on a limestone rock, a man murdered with a blow
from a strange weapon; such is the scent I have to go upon. Yes, as you
say, there is a ready explanation for all this; the girl may have run
away to London, or Liverpool, or New York; the child may be at the
bottom of the disused shaft; and the letters on the rock may be the idle
whims of some vagrant. Yes, yes, I admit all that; but I know I hold the
true key. Look!" and he held me out a slip of yellow paper.
"Characters found inscribed on a limestone rock on the Gray Hills," I
read, and then there was a word erased, presumably the name of a county,
and a date some fifteen years back. Beneath was traced a number of
uncouth characters, shaped somewhat like wedges or daggers, as strange
and outlandish as the Hebrew alphabet.
"Now the seal," said Professor Gregg, and he handed me the black stone,
a thing about two inches long, and something like an old-fashioned
tobacco stopper, much enlarged.
I held it up to the light, and saw to my surprise the characters on the
paper repeated on the seal.
"Yes," said the professor, "they are the same. And the marks on the
limestone rock were made fifteen years ago, with some red substance. And
the characters on the seal are four thousand years old at least. Perhaps
much more."
"Is it a hoax?" I said.
"No, I anticipated that. I was not to be led to give my life to a
practical joke. I have tested the matter very carefully. Only one person
besides myself knows of the mere existence of that black seal. Besides,
there are other reasons which I cannot enter into now."
"But what does it all mean?" I said. "I cannot understand to what
conclusion all this leads."
"My dear Miss Lally, that is a question I would rather leave unanswered
for some little time. Perhaps I shall never be able to say what secrets
are held here in solution; a few vague hints, the outlines of village
tragedies, a few marks done with red earth upon a rock, and an ancient
seal. A queer set of data to go upon? Half-a-dozen pieces of evidence,
and twenty years before even so much could be got together; and who
knows what mirage or terra incognita may be beyond all this? I look
across deep waters, Miss Lally, and the land beyond may be but a haze
after all. But still I believe it is not so, and a few months will show
whether I am right or wrong."
He left me, and alone I endeavored to fathom the mystery, wondering to
what goal such eccentric odds and ends of evidence could lead. I myself
am not wholly devoid of imagination, and I had reason to respect the
professor's solidity of intellect; yet I saw in the contents of the
drawer but the materials of fantasy, and vainly tried to conceive what
theory could be founded on the fragments that had been placed before me.
Indeed, I could discover in what I had heard and seen but the first
chapter of an extravagant romance; and yet deep in my heart I burned
with curiosity, and day after day I looked eagerly in Professor Gregg's
face for some hint of what was to happen.
It was one evening after dinner that the word came.
"I hope you can make your preparations without much trouble," he said
suddenly to me. "We shall be leaving here in a week's time."
"Really!" I said in astonishment. "Where are we going?"
"I have taken a country house in the west of England, not far from
Caermaen, a quiet little town, once a city, and the headquarters of a
Roman legion. It is very dull there, but the country is pretty, and the
air is wholesome."
I detected a glint in his eyes, and guessed that this sudden move had
some relation to our conversation of a few days before.
"I shall just take a few books with me," said Professor Gregg, "that is
all. Everything else will remain here for our return. I have got a
holiday," he went on, smiling at me, "and I shan't be sorry to be quit
for a time of my old bones and stones and rubbish. Do you know," he went
on, "I have been grinding away at facts for thirty years; it is time for
fancies."
The days passed quickly; I could see that the professor was all
quivering with suppressed excitement, and I could scarce credit the
eager appetence of his glance as we left the old manor house behind us,
and began our journey. We set out at mid-day, and it was in the dusk of
the evening that we arrived at a little country station. I was tired
and excited, and the drive through, the lanes seems all a dream. First
the deserted streets of a forgotten village, while I heard Professor
Gregg's voice talking of the Augustan Legion and the clash of arms, and
all the tremendous pomp that followed the eagles; then the broad river
swimming to full tide with the last afterglow glimmering duskily in the
yellow water, the wide meadows, and the cornfields whitening, and the
deep lane winding on the slope between the hills and the water. At last
we began to ascend, and the air grew rarer; I looked down and saw the
pure white mist tracking the outline of the river like a shroud, and a
vague and shadowy country, imaginations and fantasy of swelling hills
and hanging woods, and half-shaped outlines of hills beyond, and in
the distance the glare of the furnace fire on the mountain, growing by
turns a pillar of shining flame, and fading to a dull point of red. We
were slowly mounting a carriage drive, and then there came to me the
cool breath and the scent of the great wood that was above us; I seemed
to wander in its deepest depths, and there was the sound of trickling
water, the scent of the green leaves, and the breath of the summer
night. The carriage stopped at last, and I could scarcely distinguish
the form of the house as I waited a moment at the pillared porch; and
the rest of the evening seemed a dream of strange things bounded by the
great silence of the wood and the valley and the river.
The next morning when I awoke and looked out of the bow window of the
big old-fashioned bedroom, I saw under a gray sky a country that was
still all mystery. The long, lovely valley, with the river winding in
and out below, crossed in mid vision by a mediæval bridge of vaulted
and buttressed stone, the clear presence of the rising ground beyond,
and the woods that I had only seen in shadow the night before, seemed
tinged with enchantment, and the soft breath of air that sighed in at
the opened pane was like no other wind. I looked across the valley, and
beyond, hill followed on hill as wave on wave, and here a faint blue
pillar of smoke rose still in the morning air from the chimney of an
ancient gray farmhouse, there was a rugged height crowned with dark
firs, and in the distance I saw the white streak of a road that climbed
and vanished into some unimagined country. But the boundary of all was a
great wall of mountain, vast in the west, and ending like a fortress
with a steep ascent and a domed tumulus clear against the sky.
I saw Professor Gregg walking up and down the terrace path below the
windows, and it was evident that he was revelling in the sense of
liberty, and the thought that he had, for a while, bidden good-bye to
task-work. When I joined him there was exultation in his voice as he
pointed out the sweep of valley and the river that wound beneath the
lovely hills.
"Yes," he said, "it is a strangely beautiful country; and to me, at
least, it seems full of mystery. You have not forgotten the drawer I
showed you, Miss Lally? No; and you have guessed that I have come here
not merely for the sake of the children and the fresh air?"
"I think I have guessed as much as that," I replied; "but you must
remember I do not know the mere nature of your investigations; and as
for the connection between the search and this wonderful valley, it is
past my guessing."
He smiled queerly at me. "You must not think I am making a mystery for
the sake of mystery," he said. "I do not speak out because, so far,
there is nothing to be spoken, nothing definite I mean, nothing that can
be set down in hard black and white, as dull and sure and irreproachable
as any blue book. And then I have another reason: many years ago a
chance paragraph in a newspaper caught my attention, and focussed in an
instant the vagrant thoughts and half-formed fancies of many idle and
speculative hours into a certain hypothesis. I saw at once that I was
treading on a thin crust; my theory was wild and fantastic in the
extreme, and I would not for any consideration have written a hint of it
for publication. But I thought that in the company of scientific men
like myself, men who knew the course of discovery, and were aware that
the gas that blazes and flares in the gin-palace was once a wild
hypothesis; I thought that with such men as these I might hazard my
dream--let us say Atlantis, or the philosopher's stone, or what you
like--without danger of ridicule. I found I was grossly mistaken; my
friends looked blankly at me and at one another, and I could see
something of pity, and something also of insolent contempt, in the
glances they exchanged. One of them called on me next day, and hinted
that I must be suffering from overwork and brain exhaustion. 'In plain
terms,' I said, 'you think I am going mad. I think not;' and I showed
him out with some little appearance of heat. Since that day I vowed that
I would never whisper the nature of my theory to any living soul; to no
one but yourself have I ever shown the contents of that drawer. After
all, I may be following a rainbow; I may have been misled by the play of
coincidence; but as I stand here in this mystic hush and silence amidst
the woods and wild hills, I am more than ever sure that I am hot on the
scent. Come, it is time we went in."
To me in all this there was something both of wonder and excitement; I
knew how in his ordinary work Professor Gregg moved step by step,
testing every inch of the way, and never venturing on assertion without
proof that was impregnable. Yet I divined more from his glance and the
vehemence of his tone than from the spoken word that he had in his every
thought the vision of the almost incredible continually with him; and I,
who was with some share of imagination no little of a sceptic, offended
at a hint of the marvellous, could not help asking myself whether he was
cherishing a monomania, and barring out from this one subject all the
scientific method of his other life.
Yet, with, this image of mystery haunting my thoughts, I surrendered
wholly to the charm of the country. Above the faded house on the
hillside began the great forest; a long dark line seen from the opposing
hills, stretching above the river for many a mile from north to south,
and yielding in the north to even wilder country, barren and savage
hills, and ragged common land, a territory all strange and unvisited,
and more unknown to Englishmen than the very heart of Africa. The space
of a couple of steep fields alone separated the house from the wood, and
the children were delighted to follow me up the long alleys of
undergrowth, between smooth pleached walls of shining beech, to the
highest point in the wood, whence one looked on one side across the
river and the rise and fall of the country to the great western mountain
wall, and on the other, over the surge and dip of the myriad trees of
the forest, over level meadows and the shining yellow sea to the faint
coast beyond. I used to sit at this point on the warm sunlit turf which
marked the track of the Roman Road, while the two children raced about
hunting for the whinberries that grew here and there on the banks. Here
beneath the deep blue sky and the great clouds rolling, like olden
galleons with sails full-bellied, from the sea to the hills, as I
listened to the whispered charm of the great and ancient wood, I lived
solely for delight, and only remembered strange things when we would
return to the house, and find Professor Gregg either shut up in the
little room he had made his study, or else pacing the terrace with the
look, patient and enthusiastic, of the determined seeker.
One morning, some eight or nine days after our arrival, I looked out of
my window and saw the whole landscape transmuted before me. The clouds
had dipped low and hidden the mountain in the west, and a southern wind
was driving the rain in shifting pillars up the valley, and the little
brooklet that burst the hill below the house now raged, a red torrent,
down to the river. We were perforce obliged to keep snug within doors,
and when I had attended to my pupils, I sat down in the morning-room
where the ruins of a library still encumbered an old-fashioned bookcase.
I had inspected the shelves once or twice, but their contents had failed
to attract me; volumes of eighteenth century sermons, an old book on
farriery, a collection of "Poems" by "persons of quality," Prideaux's
"Connection," and an odd volume of Pope were the boundaries of the
library, and there seemed little doubt that everything of interest or
value had been removed. Now, however, in desperation, I began to
re-examine the musty sheepskin and calf bindings, and found, much to my
delight, a fine old quarto printed by the Stephani, containing the three
books of Pomponius Mela, "De Situ Orbis," and other of the ancient
geographers. I knew enough of Latin to steer my way through an ordinary
sentence, and I soon became absorbed in the odd mixture of fact and
fancy; light shining on a little of the space of the world, and beyond
mist and shadow and awful forms. Glancing over the clear-printed pages,
my attention was caught by the heading of a chapter in Solinus, and I
read the words:--
MIRA DE INTIMIS GENTIBUS LIBYAE, DE LAPIDE
HEXECONTALITHO.
"The wonders of the people that inhabit the inner parts of Libya, and of
the stone called Sixtystone."